The Deregtory

A quick recap of our game this week­end: We played host to Holy Cross, whom we had not beaten in a long time. We got out to a slow start (once again), trail­ing 16-14 at half­time and 19-14 at the end of the 3rd quar­ter. After a field goal closed the gap to 19-17, kicker Don Kephart ’11 (who is also a shot-put­ter on the track team) ran down the field on the en­su­ing kick­off and crushed the re­turn man, forc­ing a big fum­ble. On an un­re­lated note, Kephart can also re­cite the home­town and high school of every sin­gle player on our team, which means he is ei­ther way too smart or has way too much time on his hands (or maybe both?). After the fum­ble we didn’t look back, adding a field goal and touch­down to seal a 27-19 win.

We are now 3-2, which means we have played five games, which means we are at the mid­way point of our sea­son, which brings me to my next point. I’ve de­cided to offer a mid-sea­son re­view and will be tak­ing a look at some of the high­lights and low­lights from the first half of the sea­son. So which do you want first — the good news, or the bad news? Great, I was think­ing the same thing.

High­lights:

1) RB Nick Schwieger ’12 ranks third in the na­tion with 146.3 rush­ing yards per game. He has now scored five touch­downs on the sea­son and has been about as easy to tackle as a bear with sharks for arms.

2) Mike Reilly ’12 leads the Ivy League (I think) with 22.94 yards per catch. This one has me par­tic­u­larly stumped be­cause I’ve al­ways found that short passes are eas­ier to catch than long ones, but ap­par­ently Reilly has things a lit­tle back­wards. In­ter­est­ingly, he also hates smart­phones (“they have too many use­ful fea­tures in one place”) and prefers to turn off the anti-lock brak­ing sys­tem when dri­ving on wet roads, so at least he’s con­sis­tent.

3) We have only al­lowed one sack this sea­son, which is the best of any team in the coun­try. I re­cently saw a quote from Coach Buddy Teevens talk­ing about how a lot of dif­fer­ent peo­ple de­serve credit for the feat: the of­fen­sive line for block­ing well, QB Con­ner Kempe ’12 for get­ting the ball out quickly, our run­ning backs for pick­ing up blitzers and our re­ceivers for get­ting open. I agree, and think we should also give credit to our train­ers for keep­ing the afore­men­tioned play­ers healthy, those play­ers’ high school coaches for teach­ing them proper fun­da­men­tals and a con­cussed walk-on for keep­ing those play­ers’ morale at an all-time high. I apol­o­gize if I for­got any­body.

4) Our de­fense leads the Ivy League with eight in­ter­cep­tions. While that’s a great num­ber, we in­ter­cepted two long fourth down passes against Holy Cross that prob­a­bly should have just been knocked down (would have re­sulted in bet­ter field po­si­tion). It is widely ac­cepted that de­fen­sive backs are the best-look­ing play­ers in foot­ball (and our team is no ex­cep­tion), but ap­par­ently we still have some prov­ing to do with re­gards to our foot­ball aware­ness.

5) We have blocked six kicks through five games — not quite on pace to break the sin­gle-sea­son FCS record of 13, but dan­ger­ously close. Our se­cret? I can’t tell you. Loose lips sink ships. And snitches ha­bit­u­ally end up with stitches.

Low­lights:

1) Our two losses have both been painfully close. We lost to de­fend­ing cham­pion Penn in over­time, and the very next week we lost to Yale on a field goal as time ex­pired. By my cal­cu­la­tions, we are about three or four plays away from being 5-0. Re­mem­ber that I’m re­cov­er­ing from a con­cus­sion, and take my cal­cu­la­tions with a grain of salt.

2) Last game, Ryan O’Neill ’12 took a shot to the fam­ily jew­els and went down like a faint­ing goat. A lot of peo­ple get hurt in foot­ball, and it is al­ways trou­bling to see a player on the ground in pain. That being said, it’s equally hi­lar­i­ous when you re­al­ize he isn’t ac­tu­ally hurt and just got hit in the fam­ily jew­els. So this was ac­tu­ally a lit­tle bit of a high­light for me. Still, though, it was an in­ten­tional and to­tally dirty move by #94 on Holy Cross. If you are read­ing this be­cause you Googled “Ryan McGinn,” you should know that guy has my stamp of dis­ap­proval.

3) I have been grow­ing a mus­tache since the be­gin­ning of pre­sea­son. Un­for­tu­nately while I read and write at a col­lege level, I con­tinue to grow fa­cial hair at a 10th grade level and the mus­tache is dis­gust­ing. I don’t re­ally have a rea­son for grow­ing it out, but since I’ve made it this far I might as well keep it going until Hal­loween so I can dress up as a NASCAR dri­ver or a porn star. And at the end of the day I can take so­lace in the fact that it isn’t as gross as ei­ther of the Wodka broth­ers’ hair­cuts (Alex ’11 and Zach ’12).

As you can tell, the first half of the sea­son has gone pretty well. We are hop­ing to build on that suc­cess in the sec­ond half. This week marks our re­turn to Ivy League ac­tion, and we are trav­el­ing down to New York City to take on Co­lum­bia. Al­most as im­por­tantly, this week marks my tri­umphant re­turn to foot­ball ac­tion. I ex­pect that my first prac­tice will be slightly rem­i­nis­cent of Kenny Pow­ers’ re­turn to pro­fes­sional base­ball, minus the fire­works and per­haps the ob­scene ges­tures. Hope­fully it goes well, and hope­fully we come back from Co­lum­bia this week­end with our sec­ond straight win. Thanks for read­ing, see you next week!